Choose the transcript purpose
A verbatim transcript supports different tasks from a readable summary or normalized customer record. State whether fillers, repetitions, grammatical errors, and partial words should remain. Avoid asking reviewers to clean speech implicitly, because inconsistent editing can make the reference less useful for speech recognition evaluation.
Define formatting with examples
Provide rules for dates, amounts, letter sequences, product names, and account-like strings. Explain whether the written output should preserve spoken forms or normalize them. Include examples of ambiguous expressions and specify when a reviewer should mark uncertainty rather than infer an answer from the business context.
Represent non-speech and missing audio
Describe the treatment of hold music, keypad tones, laughter, coughs, silence, and inaudible spans. Distinguish a word that cannot be understood from a recording region that is absent or corrupted. Agree on whether timestamps refer to words, turns, or broader segments and how precision is recorded.
Check consistency before expansion
Have reviewers compare a varied pilot against the written conventions. Inspect disagreements and revise examples before labeling additional calls. Send Fiund the transcript specification and intended model task so a sourcing discussion can separate original audio requirements from optional annotation work and project-specific review of sensitive spoken information. Have two reviewers transcribe a short segment containing a spoken amount, an interrupted phrase, and an uncertain product name. Compare not only the words but the decisions about uncertainty and normalization. Use the disagreement to improve the written convention rather than silently selecting whichever reference happens to match a model output.
Review checklist
- Choose verbatim or normalized output
- Provide number and spelling examples
- Define inaudible and non-speech markers
- Resolve pilot disagreements before expansion